The Night She Disappeared (audiobook) – Lisa Jewell

2017: 19 year old Tallulah is going out on a date, leaving her baby with her mother, Kim.

Kim watches her daughter leave and, as late evening turns into night, which turns into early morning, she waits for her return. And waits.

The next morning, Kim phones Tallulah’s friends who tell her that Tallulah was last seen heading to a party at a house in the nearby woods called Dark Place.

She never returns.

2019: Sophie is walking in the woods near the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started work as a head-teacher when she sees a note fixed to a tree.

‘DIG HERE’ . . .

A cold case, an abandoned mansion, family trauma and dark secrets lie at the heart of Lisa Jewell’s remarkable new novel.

I recieved a review copy of The Night She Disappeared from Penguin Random House. I’d like to thank Georgie Fenn for the opportunity to listen to this brilliant new audiobook.

Regular visitors will know I love getting lost in a new audiobook. Sometimes however, the day job can get a bit chaotic and I need to give full focus to that and an audiobook takes longer than expected to complete.

Not being able to listen to The Night She Disappeared as frequently as I wanted has been extremely frustrating. I was delighted this week’s holiday gave me the chance to finally spend some quality time with this cracking audiobook production.

In 2017 Kim’s daughter Tallulah left her infant son with Kim in order to go out for an evening with her boyfriend and her college friends. The pair did not return home that evening and in the morning Kim is becoming increasingly worried.

A jump ahead to 2019 sees crime writer Sophie moving to the same village as Kim and Tallulah lived. She realises that she recognises Kim and recalls the story of her missing daughter, there are still appeals for help in finding Tallulah. Her curiosity is raised and even more so while exploring the area she finds an abandoned house and a sign suggesting someone should “Dig Here”.

That drew me in. Dual timeline stories are a bit of a favourite of mine at the moment. In the right hands an author can tease out reveals, drop red herring and keep vital information back from the reader (listener in my case). This means my perception of different characters will swing wildly from supportive to distrusting and will almost certainly ensure I have no clue where the journey will take us. Lisa Jewell is clearly an author that revels in this position of power – she had me second guessing everything!

Getting to know Tallulah in when she was the focus of the narrative POV was a bittersweet experience as we know she disappeared after a night out. Is she AWOL? Dead? Hiding from her mother and son?

Her relationship with her boyfriend (who is also father to her son) is “complicated” and he is also missing. Is he a victim too or does the fact he has a bit of a temper mean we need to treat him with suspicion? What about Scarlet? She is at Tallulah’s college and the pair have little in common yet seem to be bonding – at Scarlet’s decision.

So many questions. And through Sophie in 2019 we feel we may be seeing some of our questions answered. Or not. More secrets and mystery will follow here and Lisa Jewell is toying with us as readers.

It’s a story which does give a satisfying resolution. Having being wrong with many of my predicted outcomes I felt I was given a fair reward for the investment in the story.

All audiobook reviews need to include reference to the narrator too. A good book is too frequently let down by a listeners niggle with the voice they choose to listen to for over ten hours.

The good news here is that Joanne Froggatt delivers The Night She Disappeared brilliantly. I knew she had nailed it when early in proceedings Kim visits some of Scarlet’s friends and Joanne Froggatt nailed their disinterested vague attitudes. Oh I was raging at them!

My first time listening (or reading) Lisa Jewell. The Night She Disappeared ensures I will be back for more.

The Night She Disappeared is available in Hardback, Digital and Audiobook format.

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July 30

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Nick Triplow

So soon we are back! I have the honour of welcoming a new guest to Grab This Book today. Another booklover who has five wonderful books to add to the shelves of my Decades Library. Five books which Nick Triplow feels no self-respecting book collection should be without.

Before I allow Nick to introduce himself and share his five chosen books I will quickly recap the Decades challenge. In assembling the Decades Library I ask each guest to nominate ANY five books they would like to see added to the collection. However, there may only be one book per decade over any five consecutive decades. So it’s five books from a 50 year publication span. I want the Library to give readers the best reading choices.

I would also like to remind you that all the books which feature in my Decades collection can be purchased through the Grab This Book Decades page at bookshop.org : https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library This is an affiliate site and 10% of the cover price will go towards supporting Indy Bookshops. I also get a small cut. You can visit the site to see all the books which have been nominated by my guests. If you see a book which takes your fancy you can see the guest responsible for nominating that book (I have added this info) and return here to read their original post. The search function in the top left of this page is your friend.

This week brings news that Nick Triplow will be writing a forward to two Ted Lewis novels which will be returned to print by No Exit Press. E-books are out next month for Jack Carter’s Law and Billy Rags, paperbacks following in Spring 2022. I am thrilled that Nick is joining me today so it’s time I shuffled off and handed him the microphone…

DECADES

I’m Nick Triplow, author of the biography of noir fiction pioneer, Ted Lewis, Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir; the South London crime noir novel, Frank’s Wild Years; and the social history books Family Ties, The Women They Left Behind, Distant Water, and Pattie Slappers; well as short stories, including Face Value, a winner of the Northern Crime Short Story competition.

Along with Nick Quantrill and Nikki East, I’m a founder/director of Hull Noir Crime Fiction Festival and co-host of Hull Noir’s Three Book Friday (Hull Noir YouTube channel). I’m a graduate of Middlesex University’s English, Writing & Publishing degree and the MA Writing course at Sheffield Hallam.

Originally from South East London, I moved to Barton upon Humber (still south of the river) in 2001.

PHILIP LARKIN – THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS 1964

Larkin had arrived in Hull in 1955. Interviewed some years later, he said, ‘I never thought about Hull until I was here. Having got here, it suits me in many ways. It is a little on the edge of things.’ Exactly that. The poems are about the reality of Larkin’s life and reflections on the society that surrounds hi. They have a sense of Saturday teatime melancholy: a recognition of how time and tide diminishes each of us and of the details that matter fleetingly along the way.

Many of the poems in The Whitsun Weddings have an anecdotal, conversational tone. The language is colloquial, the poems entirely accessible. To capture a sense of the place and how perfectly Larkin walks us into the lives of people mostly like us, I can recommend watching Dave Lee’s short film of Here, read by Tom Courtenay:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZEgh5vhPVk]

JOHN LE CARRE – TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY 1974

In John Le Carré’s classic cold war novel, the spymaster George Smiley has a classic ‘tell’. In moments of reflection, the man charged with hunting for the Soviet agent buried deep inside the British secret intelligence service, cleans his glasses with ‘the fat end of his tie’, a character trait, from which we infer that somehow, beneath the multiple layers of his intellect, Smiley has access to a deeper tier of perception than those around him.

I’m on my third copy, the other two having fallen apart on the road somewhere. It has been, by turns, a companion novel on suburban commutes, through sleepless nights in box rooms in shared flats, in London parks on summer afternoons. You get the picture: it’s a book for life.

TED LEWIS – GBH 1980

As Ted Lewis’s biographer, I should register an interest.

The critical reappraisal that followed the No Exit Press reissue of GBH last year rightly regarded it as an overlooked noir classic. A brief biographical note: by 1979, Lewis was unwell, coping with diabetes and the effects of alcoholism. Taking himself to the places GBH inhabits demanded commitment to the depths of his own imagination and experience. This is the book about which Derek Raymond, himself no stranger to dark themes in his writing, wrote, was ‘a novel as direct as it is stunning … which never relaxes its grip for a paragraph … an example of how dangerous writing can really be when it is done properly.’

PAT BARKER – REGENERATION 1991

A quite extraordinary piece of historical fiction that says as much to us now about the insanity of mental health and its treatment and it does the course and causes of the trauma among First World War combatants, and the humanity of the doctors, namely W.H. Rivers, who pioneered approaches that regard patients as individuals, rather than the sum of their symptoms.

It’s a superbly written story whose historical detail blends seamlessly into the narrative texture. It’s immediate, alarming, thought provoking and thoroughly entertaining. It’s also a go-to for me as a writer. If I’m stuck, I’ll take Regeneration down from the shelf and ask: how does Pat do it?

CATHI UNSWORTH – BAD PENNY BLUES 2009

Republished by Strange Attractor Press earlier this year with a striking mod-noir cover design and an introduction by author, music journalist and cultural critic, Greil Marcus, Bad Penny Blues is a fictionalised account of the case of a killer (or killers) who, between June 1959 and February 1965, murdered eight women and left their bodies in or along the Thames in West London.

Seen through the eyes of Stella Reade, a young art student and designer haunted by visions of the murdered women and Pete Bradley, an aid to the CID at Notting Hill Police Station transferred to the notorious West End Central, Cathi Unsworth shows what the crime novel, particularly one so committed to the truth, is capable of. It’s complex and coercive, a classic London noir.

My thanks to Nick for these five brilliant recommendations. Regeneration released when I was a young bookseller working my way through university holidays. I remember selling dozens of copies and every single time I rang a sale of Regeneration through the till I was reminded of my colleagues mocking me as when I first heard about it as I thought it was a new book about Doctor Who. I was very much a young geek in training – happy days.

DECADES WILL RETURN

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July 25

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Marina Sofia

My favourite part of the week is when I get to share another Decades post. Over the past few weeks I have received more selections which I shall share with you soon and will ensure Decades continues well into August. I still have a long wishlist of guests I would love to join me in the future.

The only downside to having a pipeline of new guest posts is that I know which books are coming up each week. So imagine my surprise and delight when Decades left the building and a selection of five titles appeared on Marina Sophia’s blog over at Finding Time To Write. I offered Marina the opportunity to make her selections official and join me as a guest to curate her titles into the Library. But I also offered the opportunity to make five different selections. So this week you can scroll down for the five “official” Library additions but also use the links provided to see the initial five too – it’s a double win for sharing the booklove.

If the Decades Library is new to you then let me quickly explain what happens. I am populating the Ultimate Library starting from zero books and inviting booklovers to join me each week to add new books to the Library. Each guest has just two rules to follow when making their selections:

1 – Select ANY five books
2 – You can only select one book per decade from any five consecutive decades.

Easy – five books published over a fifty year span.

Time for me to step back and allow Marina Sophia to introduce herself and to share her five choices.

DECADES

Five Books in Five Decades: 1920-1960

Translated Fiction

I should confess that I am a thief! I enjoyed the concept of Decades so much that I ‘borrowed’ it for my own blog, using the five most recent decades. In an attempt to halt any further poaching, Gordon kindly invited me to participate in the proper version of it. I couldn’t resist, since it gives me the chance to add to the favourites I missed last time round.

I started using the pseudonym Marina Sofia for all of my literary endeavours because I was working in a very competitive and strait-laced corporate environment at the time, but now I’ve become so fond of the name that it even features on the novels that I translate. I write mainly poetry and crime fiction, although I have yet to publish a full-length volume of either. For many years I was an avid reviewer for Crime Fiction Lover before embarking on a third (fourth? fifth?) career as publisher of translated crime fiction with a social edge at Corylus Books. So it might surprise you that I did not pick crime fiction for each decade, although I did focus entirely on translated literature. I also chose five earlier decades than I featured on my blog, since these decades are among my favourites in world literature.

1920s

The Threepenny Opera – Bertolt Brecht

The First World War and its aftermath featured quite heavily in the literature of the Roaring Twenties, so I was going to suggest The Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu (1922), one of the most poignant descriptions of having to fight against your countrymen when you are part of a declining Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the English translation is obsolete and out of print, so I cannot recommend it with a clear conscience. Instead, I will suggest a far-better known piece of work. Bertolt Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper (1928) is a translation and modernisation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, so is supposedly set in London, but it describes the folly, hedonism and poverty of Berlin during the Weimar Republic superlatively well – and in fact, any society undergoing profound social transformation, as I discovered with Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. Better still, go and see this performed if you can, because the Kurt Weill music is fantastic!

1930s

Vol de Nuit – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It might surprise you to know that under duress I might have to confess that my favourite book in the whole wide world is The Little Prince, which always makes me cry no matter how many times I reread it. However, that was published in the 1940s, so instead I’ve picked another book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) (1931). With its themes of loyalty, courage and sacrificing individual lives for a greater cause, it was a timely novel which hit all the right nerves and become a great bestseller, was turned into a film and Guerlain even had a perfume created in its honour, with an iconic inverted heart bottle.

1940s

A Shameful Life – Dazai Osamu

Another decade, another war to ponder over and few do it better than Japanese writer Dazai Osamu. His two major novels, which are still hugely successful and influential in Japan, were both published immediately after the war and are tales of defeat and despair. Setting Sun (1947) is not just the portrait of a family, but also describes the directionless anomie of post-war Japan, while No Longer Human (1948) is far more personal – in fact, the author committed suicide shortly after completing it. There is flicker of hope in the former novel, while the latter is relentless in its gloom. Nevertheless, I would recommend the latter, not least because it’s out in an exhilarating fresh translation by Mark Gibeau under the title A Shameful Life.

1950s:

The Waiting Years – Enchi Fumiko

After so many men, it’s finally time to bring in a woman author, and I’ll stick to Japan. Enchi Fumiko’s The Waiting Years (1957) is a subtle study of unequal marriages and the challenges of ageing for women. Although Japanese society still discriminates against women, this book shows us how much worse it used to be a few decades earlier. The devoted wife of a government official has to not only resign herself to him taking on a second wife or concubine but also has to actively select the suitable bride herself. This novel tells the story of how they accommodate themselves to each other over time, in a restrained, beautiful style, sad, without soap-opera melodramas.

1960s:

The Sculptor’s Daughter – Tove Jansson

I had to fit in one of my favourite authors somehow, even though she wasn’t quite as productive in the 1960s as one might have expected. Tove Jansson’s Moomin days were largely behind her (published in the 1940s and 50s), while her novels for adults started coming out in the 1970s. However, she did publish a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories in 1968 entitled The Sculptor’s Daughter, which give a fascinating insight into her life as the daughter of two extremely creative parents. Needless to say, Tove is a painter both with her brushes and with her words: nobody can capture the beauty and loneliness of snowfall quite like her!

You can find me on my somewhat optimistically named blog Finding Time to Write or far too frequently on Twitter as @MarinaSofia8 and do please follow us also at @CorylusB.

My thanks to Marina for sharing her selections and be sure to check out her original post too. Although these five are the titles which will officially enter the Library, the selections are part of the fun too and there can never be too much booklove!

Something new now. I have set up a Decades Library over at Bookshop.org . Over the next few days I will add all the previous Decades selections to a Grab This Book Decades store. This will allow everyone to see all the selections which have been made since I began this challenge back in January. Sophia’s selections are already uploaded.

Grab This Book Decades allows you opportunity to purchase any of the books which have been added to the Decades Library. I also list each person that nominated the books so you can return here if you want to learn more about why any title was nominated. It is an affiliate account and this means that 10% of the cover price of the book goes to support indy bookshops, if you buy through my Decades Library shop I also get paid a percentage. I am not going to retire on any sum I may receive from this but any way to support independent booksellers is a bonus as far as I am concerned. The Decades Library is here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library

DECADES WILL RETURN

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July 17

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Derek Farrell

It is a thrill to welcome Derek Farrell back to Grab This Book, particularly as I can welcome Derek in his latest publication week. The new Danny Bird novel, Death at Dukes Halt, released yesterday and the book with accompanying (very cool) merch is available from the Fahrenheit Press website.

Full introduction and purchase links in a second, first a quick introduction to the challenge I set Mr Farrell.

This is Decades. I am inviting book lovers to join me and asking them to help me assemble the best library of books. I began this quest back in January and I had no books on my library shelves. Each week I invite a guest to join me and they are asked to select five of their favourite books to be added to my Ulitmate Library.

Now picking five books is a little too easy so I add a second rule which governs the choices each guest makes. They can only select one book per decade over five consecutive decades. I am told this leads to some angst.

So it is time to hand you over to Derek to introduce his selections. One of my all-time favourite reads is in the mix today, can you guess which?

Derek Farrell is the author of the Danny Bird mysteries ‘Death of a Diva’ ‘Death of a Nobody,’ ‘Death of a Devil,’ ‘Death of an Angel,’ and ‘Death at Dukes Halt,’ as well as the novellas ‘Death of a Sinner,’ and ‘What goes around.’

Derek is married and lives with his husband in West Sussex. They have no cats dogs goats or children, though they do have every Kylie Minogue record ever recorded. Twice.

He can be reached on twitter @derekifarrell or via his website www.derekfarrell.co.uk

His books can be purchased directly from the publisher here https://fahrenheit-press.myshopify.com/search?type=product&q=derek+farrell

Or from Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Derek-Farrell/e/B06XJ9C6XB?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1603393406&sr=8-1

DECADES

Thanks so much for having me on this feature. I’m honoured to have my submissions joining those of so many amazing contributors before me.

I have always loved libraries and in fact my first book ‘Death of a Diva’ was dedicated to my dad, who took me to the library and gave me a universe to play in. Public Libraries are what made it possible for a kid like me to read any- and everything I wanted, to find the stuff I loved, and to dream of being a writer.

But it was my dad who showed me that reading is a joyful activity, and should always be joyful. “Read the classics, if you want to,” he told me once. “Or don’t, if you don’t want to. The key thing is to love what you read.”

My choices are below, and I hope they inspire some of your readers to find some new loves.

60s – The Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock (1967)

What’s it about: In a post-nuclear holocaust future, where science and sorcery co-exist. the Dark Empire of Granbretan  is expanding across Europe. Baron Meliadus, an emissary of the empire, is sent to the castle of Count Brass to try to persuade him to side with the empire against the other European courts. While in the castle, he begins to court the Count’s daughter, Yisselda, but she refuses to elope with him. Meliadus attempts to kidnap her, but is defeated by Count Brass and swears an oath on the legendary Runestaff to gain power over Count Brass, gain Yisselda and destroy their lands.

In order to achieve these ends, he sends a newly-captured Rebel – Duke Dorian Hawkmoon Von Koln – to the castle, and to ensure Hawkmoon does not betray him, he uses dark sorcery to embed a black jewel in the middle of Hawkmoon’s skull, the jewel acting as a camera that will transmit everything Hawkmoon sees and hears back to Meliadus…

Why it should be in the Library: I discovered these books in the early 80s, having never been much of a sci-fi or fantasy fan. I’m still not a huge reader of those genres, but I spent a summer reading this seies (“The High History of the Runestaff”). The stories, the characters and the feeling of just HAVING to know what happens next, has never left me. This book taught me that regardless of genre, a great story is a great story, and these are great great stories.

70s – Curtain by Agatha Christie (1975 – or was it?)

What’s it about? The novel features Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings in their final appearances in Christie’s works. It is a country house novel, with all the characters and the murder set in one house. Not only does the novel return the characters to the setting of her first, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but it reunites Poirot and Hastings, who last appeared together in Dumb Witness in 1937 as they hunt for a serial killer who has already gotten away with murder five times. But this time, Porot is determined that justice will be served.

Christie actually wrote this book in the middle of the Blitz as bombs rained down around her. A sign of how deeply a writer can become enmeshed with their characters is that instead of worrying about her own safety, she began to worry about what would happen to Poirot if she were to be killed in a bombing.

So she wrote the final Poirot novel, which was delivered with instructions that it was to be published only after she had died. The manuscript was then then kept in a safe (with a copy in a similar safe at her New York publishers) for over thirty years.

Why Should it be in the Library? Because whatever your feelings about Christie’s work, her impact on the crime genre is unarguable, and Curtain is a wonderful mystery novel, the clues woven seamlessly through an admittedly somewhat contrived scenario. Poirot has always been an old man, but here he’s close to decrepit, wheelchair-bound at times, and raging at the cruelty of time that can decay a body but leave his little grey cells as vital as they ever were. Plus, the ending <no spoilers> is a genuine GASP moment that stays with anyone who knows Poirot long after the book.

80s – Blue Heaven by Joe Keenan (1988)

What’s it about? Philip Cavanaugh is surprised to hear that his best friend Gilbert is engaged to be married to Moira. There are two reasons for his surprise: Gilbert loathes Moira with every fibre of his being. But more importantly, Gilbert is flamingly gay.

Gilbert finally confides in Phillip that the entire marriage is a sham designed to maximise the cash gifts from the family of his new Italian-American stepfather, and by the time the trio realise that said family are the Mafia, and that their little attempted fraud may well end up with the three of them wearing concrete overcoats and taking a dip in the East River, they are in too deep to walk away.

Joe Keenan wrote three novels featuring Gilbert and Phillip as well as a rather sweet Broadway musical before becoming a writer and Executive Producer for Fraser and working on Desperate Housewives and Glee.

Why Should it be in the Library? Because it’s quite simply one of the funniest and best plotted / paced / written books of all time. I read it they year it was first published and it has never been off my bookshelves since.

90s – The Burglar in the Library (1997)

What’s it about? For Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookseller and compulsive burglar, a weekend at a country bed & breakfast inn takes an unexpected twist when a valuable book is stolen and dead body turns up in the library.

Why Should it be in the Library? In the early 2000s I attended a crime fiction course at City Lit in London. On the first night we each had to declare our favourite crime writer. I, of course, made my case for Agatha Christie. But a woman who would eventually become a dear friend and mentor to me talked about this guy called Lawrence Block – an American who had written dozens of books and won dozens of prizes. Block’s not James Joyce. His career was not built on groundbreaking origination, but on consistently and conscientiously producing excellent work within a genre he clearly loves. This has to necessitate, at times, playing with the tropes of that genre, and here we find Bernie in basically a Golden Age country house mystery. Every character is not only a suspect, but suspicious; everyone has both a motive and an alibi; and circumstances conspire to ensure that the murderer must be one of the people trapped in the inn.

Block is normally recognised for his darker Matt Scudder novels, but I think that the Bernie the Burglar books more openly reflect his sheer joy in the genre. This one’s playful but fiendishly well plotted, and I’m putting this one in to the library because it’s a book that has given me much joy by a writer whose work I admire greatly. And really, if you can’t love the books in your library, what’s the point in having a library?

00s – The Lost Army of Cambyses by Paul Sussman (2002)

What’s it about? 523 BC: the Persian pharaoh Cambyses dispatches an army across Egypt’s western desert to destroy the oracle at Siwa. Legend has it that somewhere in the middle of the Great Dune Sea his army is overwhelmed by a sandstorm and lost forever.

Two and a half millennia later, a mutilated corpse is washed up on the banks of the Nile at Luxor, an antiques dealer is savagely murdered in Cairo, and a British archaeologist is found dead at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara.

The incidents appear unconnected, but Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police is not so sure.

And so he begins an investigation that will lead him into the forbidding, barren heart of the western desert, and the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world…

Why Should it be in the Library? Because it’s a brilliant thriller nobody’s ever heard of from a writer who was taken from us tragically early. Paul Sussman was an archaeologist, a journalist and an author whose Middle-Eastern set thrillers mixed high octane page turners with genuine humanity, and confronted the heart-breaking complexities of the region while never losing sight of their primary function: To keep you turning those pages.

He died of a ruptured aneyurism just weeks before his 46th birthday, and days before his final novel “The Labyrinth of Osiris” was published. That book, in particular, is one of the best and most heartbreaking thrillers I’ve ever read.

Sussman’s work is pacy, tight, thrilling, and human. It carries a vast amount of historical research so lightly that the reader doesn’t even know how much they’re learning as they read these hugely enjoyable books. And his tragically early death is a reminder to each and every one of us to strive every day to live the best life possible, and to write the best book we possibly can.

Huge thanks to Derek for adding a great mix of titles to my Library. I know each week someone’s TBR grows thanks to the recommendations of my guests – I hope that you will also add Death at Dukes Halt to your shopping this week.

DECADES WILL RETURN

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July 3

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Sara Sheridan

Welcome to the Decades challenge. It didn’t begin life as a challenge but as each week goes by I am becoming increasingly aware of the scale of the task I have started.

In January I asked myself the question “Which books would be added to the Ultimate Library? If I were to build a brand-new Library and start with no books, which titles should I add to the empty shelves to get the very best selection available for the Library visitors?”

I knew this was not something I could undertake alone so I have been inviting authors, bloggers, journalists and publishers to join me and help me decide which books should be added to the Library. Each guest is asked to nominate five of their favourite books to add to my Ultimate Library. But there is a small catch – my guests can only select one book per decade over five consecutive decades.

So while my challenge is to get the best books. My guests have the harder challenge – they have to decide which 50-year span they want to choose from and then work out which book best represents each decade within those 50 years. I am told this is a “frustrating” process.

This week I am delighted to welcome Sara Sheridan to Grab This Book.

Sara Sheridan writes history – both fiction and nonfiction. Her Mirabelle Bevan murder mystery series is set in the 50s and she also writes in the late Georgian/early Victorian period – her latest novel The Fair Botanists is out in August and is an intrigue set in 1820s Edinburgh. She remapped Scotland according to women’s history in Where are the Women. You can find her on twitter @sarasheridan where she posts historical research, writing snippets and ice cream tips. Sara’s own books and reading picks are available on her curated page at: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/sarasheridan

DECADES

4.50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie 1950s I mean there had to be a Miss Marple, right? Long term role model and Queen of Mystery. Right on brand for me and I’m obsessed with the 50s (among other things)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 1960s I’m so conflicted about Muriel. Gawd. She was unbelievably uncomfortable in her own skin and was super-mean to her son but I love this book, which speaks so much of mid century Edinburgh where I was brought up.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 1970s and a book which racists keep trying to ban. Morrison’s first novel and so ahead of the game. An absolute must-read.

Water Music by TC Boyle 1980s The single most rambunctious, dirty, tough historical novel I’ve read. I recommend this book to everybody who is interested in British culture. It’s all about where we came from.

The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson 1990s Never mind the Queen, God Save Eva Ibbotson. All her adult fiction is gorgeous, good hearted and full of love. The. Best.

My thanks to Sara for these fabulous selections. Some new reading for me in these selections and but some old favourites too. The best moments for me are when I first read the five choices my new guests have made and I nod and smile my way down the list. Opening with Agatha Christie got the smile in place from the outset.

You can visit the Decades Library and see all the selections which have been made thus far by clicking here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

DECADES WILL RETURN

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June 26

Fragile – Sarah Hilary

Everything she touches breaks . . .

Nell Ballard is a runaway. A former foster child with a dark secret she is desperately trying to keep, all Nell wants is to find a place she can belong.

So when a job comes up at Starling Villas, home to the enigmatic Robin Wilder, she seizes the opportunity with both hands.

But her new lodgings may not be the safe haven that she was hoping for. Her employer lives by a set of rigid rules and she soon sees he is hiding secrets of his own.

But is Nell’s arrival at the Villas really the coincidence it seems? After all, she knows more than most how fragile people can be – and how easily they can be to break . . .

My thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opporunity to host this leg of the Fragile Blog Tour. I was very grateful to recieve a review copy through Netgalley.

I always enjoy reading Sarah Hilary, her Marnie Rome books are among the best police thrillers currently being published and she never shields her characters from the worst experiences. Readers can normally expect a comforting security when reading about recurring characters – the danger happens elsewhere, to other people, leaving our favourite cops free to sweep in and catch the killer or lock up the bad guys. Not so with Sarah Hilary’s books, she is one of the few authors where you do feel the gloves are off and every single person she creates can just as easily be destroyed. The gut-punch twists she works so well into her stories are what bring me back every single time.

Knowing that Fragile was a stand alone novel I started reading with one thought uppermost in my mind – anything could happen here!

Nell was a runaway, living on the streets of London with Joe and the pair of them doing what it took to survive. Then one night Joe vanishes leaving Nell alone. She knows where she saw him last and returns to the street to watch for him. She eventually spots Starling Villas – a tiny doorway in a busy street which leads to the house behind. This is where Joe was last seen, going into this house and Nell is going to find out what happened to him in there. Starling Villas is the main hub of activity for the events unfolding but the history Nell and Joe share are equally relevant to the current events so readers will revisit Nell’s past to understand how she comes to find herself knocking on the door of Starling Villas applying for a job she finds out about by chance.

Nell had been brought up in care. From a very young age she cleaned, cooked, scrubbed, mended and did whatever else was required to appease the woman who was acting as her guardian. On learning the mysterious and enigmatic Robin Wilder needed an assistant in Starling Villas Nell makes herself available as a housekeeper. Her responsibilities are meticulously laid out, her every waking moment appears to be planned and her new employer gives away very little, even to the point of virtually ignorning Nell’s existence. She want’s to investigate the house to look for signs of Joe but so carefully plotted are her responsibilites it is hard to see how this could happen.

The pair have a very strange, controlled existence in Starling Villas but that precision is about to be shattered as Wilder’s wife adds an infusion of chaos to the dynamic. Nell hates her from the outset but also knows that this woman is involved with Joe’s disappearance. Things are about to get intense and with Sarah Hilary pulling the strings there is just no telling where we will end up.

Fragile was a fabulous read. For large parts the story felt out of its time. Starling Villas and the seclusion it brought from the outside world, the role of cook and housekeeper for the young girl who also washes, mends and does the shopping for her master. It had an old-world feel but then a mobile telephone is mentioned and you are brought back to the reality of a modern world but with a strange relationship and cirsumstance within this unusual house and its quirky residents.

I fully understand why Fragile is described as modern gothic The writing is beautiful, the depiction of Starling Villas and Nell’s challenging world were vivid and detailed in my imagination. For large parts of the book I had no idea where events may lead but I was fully caught up in the story and I was there for every step of that journey. Highly recommended.

Fragile is published by Macmillan and is available in hardback, digital and audiobook format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08KQGC527/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Category: From The Bookshelf | Comments Off

June 25

Decades: Compiling the Ulitmate Library with R.J. Barker

How quickly Friday comes around these days! It gives me enormous pleasure to bring another Decades Curator to Grab This Book. For those keeping track of the guests who enjoyed making their selections and those who cursed me – this is 100% a cursing week.

If you are new to Decades and have no idea what I am wittering on about then Welcome. In January I set myself the challenge of filling a new library with the very best books. We started with no books on the shelves and each week I invite a new guest to join me and add five of their favourite reads (the books which MUST be represented in any self-respecting library) to my Decades Library.

Why is it a Decades Library? Well guests have just two rules to follow…they can choose ANY five books but their selections must include just one book per decade over any five consecutive decades. Simple I thought. But there has been much cursing of those two rules.

My guest this week won the 2020 British Fantasy Society (BFS) Robert Holdstock award for Best Novel with his fourth novel The Bone Ships. This was after his debut trilogy (collectively known as The Wounded Kingdom) garnered rave reviews from readers and industry press.

Somewhat confusingly he lives somewhere South of here in “The North” in a home he is filling with taxidermy, “odd art” and lots of music. Having decided a music career was not to happen RJ Barker started writing the books we love.

It is a little known fact that RJ has an Evil Twin who writes crime thrillers (A Numbers Game recently released and available now). But we don’t talk about him here. Today it is all about R.J. Barker:

DECADES

CJ Cherryh. Gate of Ivrel (1976)

I’m starting with this cos this list is in date order but I didn’t start with this.

I was absolutely shocked to find out this was Cherryh’s debut when I was looking into the book, as her tale of the interdimensional Sorcerer Morgaine and her companion the barbarian, Vanye, is incredibly accomplished and one of those books that has just stuck with me. The platonic male/female friendship is something I’ve carried through six books now and I put that at the feet of Cherryh. Not only that but also the way she wrote it, it’s not an easy book to approach, the text is very mannered and in her other books she matches text to subject which I love. It also goes places that were totally unexpected. At the time I’d read a lot of the things that are considered ‘classic’ and that owe a clear debt of allegiance to Tolkien but in Gate of Ivrel (and the sequels) Cherryh offered me something new that, for me, had far more depth and surprises in it and was doing it without a massive series.

TL/DR I owe C.J. Cherryh a drink.

IAN M. BANKS Consider Phlebas 1987

Well. The Culture. Few are the things that set my mind alight in the way Iain M Banks work did. In fact, my first professional level novel was turned down for being too Banksish. Which, you know, high compliment, I thought anyway. I’ve chosen Phlebas because it was the first but it could be any of them. And I always read Consider in tandem with Look to Windward as the two books talk to one another. I’m not going to go on at length about Bank’s SF, other people have done that and they have done it with far more depth than I can. But Banks’ work just fills me with joy, at his worlds, at his characters and at the real love of people it contains. It’s sad that I will never get to tell him what a profound influence his books were on me, but I am very happy that with them.

CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO Darker Jewels. 1993

You can, to be quite frank, keep Anne Rice. If you want to read about vampires that struggle with what it is to be human then Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Comte St Germain is where to go. This particular book is set in Russia in the court of Ivan the Terrible, it is dense and dark and as its heart is a creature we are taught to think of as a monster when he is anything but. St Germain is often the most human character within Yarbro’s books, his centuries of existence give him a perspective on the historical events surrounding him the other players lack. His learning and attempts to bring a sense of decency are ultimately doomed when he comes upon people who are fundamentally not decent. Is it magical creatures flying around murdering people and drinking blood? No. Is it darker and more horrific than any other vampire story you’ll come across? For my money, yes.

Dissolution C.J. Sansom 2004

There is so much of this book which I lifted for my own Wounded Kingdom books. That sense of melancholy, an overarching feeling that things are not going to go well for these people no matter what they do. Enter from stage left, Matthew Shardlake, hunchback lawyer in the court of King Henry VIII. I love Sansom’s work and it is that sense of melancholy within them that draws me in. There’s a real sense, as Shardlake becomes more and more entangled in the lethal politics of Henry’s court that the absolute best outcome Shardlake is ever going to be capable of is to simply get out alive and that he knows that. He is a small and unimportant person moving among vast and powerful men who would think nothing of crushing him. These are wonderful books and I adore them.

James Lee Burke Robicheaux. 2018

Now, I actually wanted to write about A Private Cathedral which, although written in 2019 was published in 2020 and fell foul of the rules. But It’s an amazing book where JLB sneaks an urban fantasy novel past the literary establishment as a crime novel. BUT, I can’t, so I will talk about an earlier book in the series, Robicheaux. This is a book I never want to read again. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. It shows just what an outstanding writer JLB is, but my god it is grim. I’m glad I read it but I’m not going back. In fact, if you had told me that just as he started writing this the author was told he had a few months to live I would have believed you. It has that feel to it. All the way through I thought the author was going to end it with this book, that no one would survive. It is an exercise in tension that I hugely enjoyed upon reading, but have no wish to put myself through again.

A Private Cathedral is a stunner though.

Huge thanks to RJ for joining in with my Decades Challenge. He was extremely polite despite my astonishing ability to only contact him at the most inconvenient times and has brought some fabulous new recommendations to my Library. If you haven’t read any of RJ’s books yet then you can find them all here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/RJ-Barker/e/B005LVVCTQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1

The Decades Library continues to grow and you can see all the previous selections here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

DECADES WILL RETURN

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June 23

True Crime Story – Joseph Knox

‘What happens to those girls who go missing? What happens to the Zoe Nolans of the world?’

In the early hours of Saturday 17 December 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months.

She was never seen again.

Seven years after her disappearance, struggling writer Evelyn Mitchell finds herself drawn into the mystery. Through interviews with Zoe’s closest friends and family, she begins piecing together what really happened in 2011. But where some versions of events overlap, aligning perfectly with one another, others stand in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies.

Shaken by revelations of Zoe’s secret life, and stalked by a figure from the shadows, Evelyn turns to crime writer Joseph Knox to help make sense of a case where everyone has something to hide.

Zoe Nolan may be missing presumed dead, but her story is only just beginning

My thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opportunity to host this leg of the blog tour. I recieved a review copy from the publishers.

It’s nice to sit down to write a review of a book which you loved. I came in to True Crime Story blind so had no idea what to expect and what I found was a slick story told unconventionally through a series of interview snippets and email correspondence. Initially I wasn’t sure I would enjoy reading the short bursts of contributions from various characters, an edited conversation pieced together after the events in question. However, I quickly found my first hesitancy had been misguided and I found I was really enjoying spending time reading something which shook up the norm.

The story focuses around the disappearance of student Zoe Nolan. Last seen on Saturday December 17th 2011. She vanished from her halls of residence at Manchester University and events around this incident are recounted by a number of people who crossed paths with Zoe and the subsequent investigation into her disappearance. The key players in the story are Zoe’s twin sister Kim, her boyfriend, their flatmates and (subsequently) Zoe and Kim’s parents. Other people phase in and out of the interviews but everything his brought together by Evelyn who is writing a book on Zoe’s continued absence and is sharing her writing and a few other thoughts and problems with her friend Joseph Knox. Yes the same Joseph Knox – it’s a nice twist to the narrative.

Where to start but not do any spoilers? Tricky.

Readers get to understand the relationship Zoe and Kim had with their parents and then see how the twins were very much different people, with different interests and a very different destiny. When Zoe and Kim get to university they form friendships and get thrust into accommodation with strangers, they will all need to adapt to their new surroundings and the new faces around them. Needless to say things do not go smoothly and there are several flashpoint incidents and situations which gives the reader a glimpse into the characters of all the players in this game.

True Crime Story is an emotive story and nobody connected with Zoe Nolan is going to come out of this book unscathed. Joseph Knox captures the claustrophobia of a group living in close proximity and the fractious relationships that this can bring. He brings life to these characters and my investment in their individual stories was sealed very early into the book. The outstanding narrative style works perfectly and gives the young students an authenticity that you do believe you are indeed reading a True Crime Story.

True Crime Story is available in Hardback, Digital and Audiobook format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08HGMDNP2/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Category: Blog Tours, From The Bookshelf | Comments Off

June 18

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Fiona Erskine

Yesterday I reviewed Phosphate Rocks by Fiona Erskine. It is mid June 2021 and Phosphate Rocks is easily the best book I have read so far this year. If you haven’t heard me raving about how much I enjoyed it then I would urge you to read this post then read my review (I shall pop a link at the bottom of the page).

Today Fiona is back and taking on my Decades challenge. Each week I invite a guest to join me and I ask them to help me assemble a Library of the very best books. Each guest has just two rules to follow:

1- Choose ANY five books
2 – You may only choose one book per decade over five consecutive decades.

My aim is, with the assistance of my guests, to get the very best selection of books into a Library which began with zero titles on the shelves. The literary quest began six months ago and on a weekly basis I get feedback from guests (past, present and future) who curse me for imposing those two rules on their selections and the flexing of the rules has been varied and impressive. You are in for a treat today as the most impressive flexing of the rules is about to be revealed…it’s a good job I loved Phosphate Rocks or there may have been a need for a VAR ruling – you will see what I mean 😉

DECADES

I’m Fiona Erskine and I started writing after a skiing accident gave me some unexpected time off from my day job as a professional engineer.

My first novel, The Chemical Detective, introduces explosives expert Dr Jaq Silver, blowing things up to keep people safe as she tracks a criminal gang from the ski-slopes of the Slovenian Alps to the ruins of Chernobyl. My second novel. The Chemical Reaction, opens with Jaq in trouble on a yacht in the Black Sea. When she blows it up to rescue her crewmate, she has to find a way to pay the owner back. Taking a risky job in China, she finds herself fighting for her life the shadow of the infamous Banqiao Dam. My thrillers have been shortlisted for The Specsavers Debut Crime Novel Award and The Staunch Prize and I’ve signed a deal with Point Blank to produce at least 2 more in the Jaq Silver series.

My latest book Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects is a fictionalised account of my very first graduate job. A body is discovered in the ruins of a defunct fertiliser factory, encased in phosphate rock. The police work with retired shift foreman, John Gibson, to try and identify the deceased from the ten objects found with the mummified corpse.

I’m thrilled to have been invited to contribute to Decades. It’s a totally engaging idea, and one I have had some fun with. As well as some pain.

1950 – 1990

1958 Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene – Cuba

1966 The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott – India

1975 The Periodic Table by Primo Levi – Italy and a German concentration camp

1981 Moonraker by F. Tennyson Jesse – Haiti and the Carribean

1994 Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson – Canada to Japan to Russia

1950

I’ve always loved reading, especially on trains, and my first choice has to be Graham Greene. His books were the perfect length for a journey between Edinburgh (where I was born and went to school) and Cambridge (where I went to university) with a chapter left over for bedtime. Greene was the first author I trusted enough to buy a book based on the writer rather than on the subject matter. I loved the distinctive covers, white with big black letters plus an orange penguin. The books were deceptively slim, but always packed a punch. Aged 17 (and described by a great-aunt as an illiterate alcoholic), I wouldn’t normally have chosen stories about vacuum cleaner salesmen, defrocked priests or lepers but over the next four years I devoured every novel Graham Greene had written. And grew up.

For this (fiendish…shakes first and curses) challenge, Graham Greene also brings the huge advantage that I could have chosen almost any one of his novels written between 1929 and 1990.

Our Man in Havana (1958) by Graham Greene.

Our Man in Havana is the story of a salesman in Cuba who tries to make a bit of money on the side as a spy. There’s a gulf of understanding between those in headquarters and those in the field which James Wormold exploits to his advantage, fabricating information, sketching his own vacuum cleaner nozzles at giant scale as proof of a military installation in the mountains. Credulous M16 take it all at face value and send reinforcements. But lies have a habit of coming back to bite their creator. I must just add that the hapless spy genre is alive and kicking as demonstrated by my favourite book of 2021 so far – Starlings of Bucharest by Sarah Armstrong.

1960

The Jewel in the Crown (1966) by Paul Scott

I recently listened to an audio version of the Raq Quartet series, and it reminded me how much I adored these books first time round. One of my Edinburgh primary school teachers, Mrs Harris, had lived in India in Raj times and told us extraordinary stories, which flooded back as I read these books. I have chosen the first in the series, The Jewel in the Crown. Set in the 1940’s it tells the story of Hari Kumar, returning to northern India after an education at an English public school. He is rejected by both the English rulers and his fellow Indians. When Daphne, an awkward English girl, tries to help Hari, things do not end well. It’s wonderfully perceptive exploration of racism, of control of the many by the few, a theme that recurs in Abir Mukerjee’s recent (and wonderfully nuanced) Wyndham & Banerjee novels which I wholeheartedly recommend.

1970

The Periodic Table (1975) by Primo Levi

If I had to choose a single book that changed my life, then it would be The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. While I was still a student, I spent a summer in Sri Lanka with a group of volunteers. The stated mission was to build a road to connect two villages in the mountains near Kandy. It soon became clear that our real job was to provide entertainment for a group of young people who had been persuaded onto a work experience program to keep villagers away from the big bad cities. The socio-technical project was impossible: the terrain impenetrable, the tools (pickaxes and udeles – a sort of crude right angled shovel) blunt and heavy and the cities exciting. We did a lot of singing and dancing instead, teaching each other our languages with stories and jokes – although everyone found the big white people hilarious even without a punchline. We also shared books which led to my discovery of Primo Levi.

The Periodic Table is a series of interconnected stories, each based on a chemical element. Primo Levi was an Italian industrial chemist who was sent to a German concentration camp during the second world war. His memoir If This Is a Man is a ferociously powerful book about what it means to be human. Levi narrowly survived Auschwitz by working in IG Farben’s synthetic rubber chemistry lab and the stories in The Periodic Table cover his work as an industrial chemist, before during and after the war. In the story Vanadium, Levi identifies one of his German supervisors from Auchwitz after the war by the mistakes he makes in correspondence about some faulty chemicals. Levi writes beautifully about the practical realities of science in a way that is accessible to all. This book is the inspiration for all my writing.

1980

Virago modern classics were a complete revelation for me during my university days. I devoured the green spined books as fast as they arrived.

Moonraker (1981) by F. Tennyson Jesse

I particularly loved Moonraker, a swashbuckling pirate adventure story with a great twist (no spoilers here) and the sideswipe that illuminates the tragic fate of ex-slave and Haitian freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse was a fascinating character, a war-correspondent, criminologist, and playwright. Born in 1888, she suffered from rickets as a child and became briefly addicted to morphine after an accident led to the amputation of part of her hand.

I could have chosen The Lacquer Lady or A Pin to see the Peepshow by the same author, or any number of other wonderful Virago published books by other writers, but Moonraker is my stand-out thrilling favourite.

(I confess to cheating slightly here, as Moonraker was first launched in 1927, but it only came to wide attention when Virago republished it in 1981. If you disqualify this one, I’ll be forced to shuffle the others around and name Ian Fleming’s inferior Moonraker (1955) first, as a way to sneak this neglected story into the spotlight.)

1990

Last but not least, the ultimate thriller.

Kolmysky Heights (1994) by Lionel Davidson

I love the long slow build-up of Kolmysky Heights. Linguist Johnny Porter initially rejects the coded challenge and then takes most of the book to reach the Siberian wastes in order to penetrate the mysterious research centre. No sooner in, than he has to get out. Nobody has ever escaped before, but Johnny is an engineer – right up my street!

I could have chosen one of Davidson’s other novels, The Rose of Tibet and Smiths Gazelle are particularly good, but Kolmysky Heights is the stand-out tecno-thriller with the perfect hero.

Looking back at my five choices, I realise two things.

The first is that I have always been a traveller. When I can’t get on a train myself, I travel though books.

The second thing is that I have inadvertently chosen 4 out of 5 books by white men whereas my current reading is much more diverse. I did a check step to see what female authors I had missed. I could have included beloved authors of exquisite prose (Alice Munro, Arundhati Roy), children’s adventure writers (Jan Mark, Joan Aiken), regency romance (Georgette Heyer), science fiction supremo (Ursula Le Guin) or any number of accomplished writers of crime and police procedurals.

But the books that influenced me, that spurred my own writing on, were the science mysteries and adventure thrillers that I read as a young adult. And at that time, most of the books published were written by white men.

Publishing has changed and is much the better for it.

The Chemical Detective and The Chemical Reaction are published by Point Blank, paperback £8.99

Phosphate Rocks is published by Sandstone Press, paperback 8.99.

My thanks again to Fiona for these terrific selections. When I first saw Moonraker I did automatically assume the travelling adventures were heading to space but it wasn’t to be (this time). I promised a link to my Phosphate Rocks review: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5371

You can visit The Decades Library here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

Every book my guests have nominated are shown in The Library and you can see all the curators at the end of the list.

DECADES WILL RETURN

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June 17

Phosphate Rocks – Fiona Erskine

As the old chemical works in Leith are demolished a long deceased body encrusted in phosphate rock is discovered. Seated at a card table he has ten objects laid out in front of him. Whose body is it? How did he die and what is the significance of the objects?

I received a review copy from the publisher through Netgalley.

It doesn’t matter what you may think this book is about. If you read the brief, teasing blurb above that’s only going to scratch the surface of the story in Phosphate Rocks.

As I read the book I tweeted a few times that I had no idea how I was going to review it. That hasn’t changed, I am not sure how to succinctly articulate the utter pleasure I experienced reading Phosphate Rocks. Or the anguish, the horror, the fascination or the fun. This book had it all and, when it was done, I wasn’t. I wanted more. I wanted to keep reading about these remarkable overlooked heroes of their craft.

So what’s it about?

Well there’s a dead body in an old chemical plant in Leith (Edinburgh). The site is no longer active but before everything closed down it seems, somehow, a huge shroud of phosphate rock encased a work hut. Inside that hut was a dead body sat at a table. Laid out on the table in front of the corpse were ten objects which the police hope John Gibson, former shift manager at the site, can use to identify the deceased.

Sitting in a police station, years after his plant had closed down, John identifies each of the ten objects and tells Detective Inspector Rose Irvine the story behind each item. With each passing object the reader gets to know more about the men that worked the site, the work they undertook and how chemicals and materials from around the world would pass under the nose of these Edinburgh workers.

Also filling in the reader with background information is author, Fiona Erskine, who gives each object a quirky and fascinating science lesson. You learn about chemicals, reactions, inventions and discoveries. Reading this book taught me how chemicals move around the world, how they need carefully stored and cared for and how it’s the plant workers that know best how to keep a busy chemical site ticking over – not the managers, chemists or owners. It may not sound like slipping chemistry learning into a crime story could be fun or engaging but it is utterly absorbing (though Fiona will likely correct me on what absorption actually is).

The stories behind each of the objects are wonderful. Although this book is a work of fiction I am 100% convinced that many (if not all) of the stories are entirely anecdotal and based on actual events from the site. Why tie a long string around the neck of a whisky bottle? Who had the best dressed Barbie Doll in Scotland? Why should you not hit a pipe with a hammer and…is that an author cameo we see before us? If many events in the book are indeed based on actual events it may go a long way towards explaining why the book is so engaging. Nothing feels forced, overdone or over-exaggerated. The guys (and in the main it is guys) working on the site all feel utterly real and entirely plausible. I defy you not to warm to them.

The true hero of the piece is John Gibson. He is taken on a journey back through his working life and the stories he tells DI Irvine bring back memories of old colleagues – some more fondly remembered than others. John and DI Irvine are a charming pairing through the story too their conversations, some of which take place away from the police station when Irvine tracks him down to his favourite restaurant, are a cautious but intricate dance. Neither party is willing to overshare but both appear to crave more knowledge about the other.

Phosphate Rocks is a crime story. There is a dead body, there are clues to help the investigators determine his identity and there is a man helping police with their enquries at the police station. But Phosphate Rocks is so much more. It is a story of a life (John Gibson), of many lives, of a plant that no longer dominates its corner of Leith and of the men who for years kept that plant ticking over. Clever men, inventive men, hard men and men with secrets. But I felt Phosphate Rocks is also a love story. I read of a time now gone which is much missed, a love of science and method and process and of low paid staff performing dangerous and skilled work. An affection of the cameraderie, the respect for John Gibson and the responsibility he held for the staff on his shift. It’s funny then it’s tragic and I want you all to read this story too.

Phosphate Rocks, currently my book of the year. It will take something incredible to top this one.

Phosphate Rocks is published by Sandstone Press and is available from today in paperback and digital format. You can get your copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08TR21QGZ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1

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